Japan’s Nikkei buys FT

LONDON — Japan’s Nikkei is buying the Financial Times for £844 million cash, the FT’s parent company Pearson said Thursday after hours of frantic speculation about a sale.

Pearson, the British education giant, is off-loading the salmon-colored financial newspaper after nearly six decades.

John Fallon, Pearson’s chief executive, said it had “reached an inflection point in media, driven by the explosive growth of mobile and social” where the best owner for the FT would be a global, digital news company.

Nikkei is one of the biggest media groups in Asia, with interests including the leading financial newspaper in Japan. Its offer trumped that of Axel Springer, the German publisher, which had also been in talks with Pearson, according to people familiar with the situation.

Nikkei’s winning bid is 35 times the FT Group’s adjusted operating income for 2014, according to a statement by Pearson to its investors Thursday.

The deal, which has to be approved by regulators, will not include Pearson’s 50 percent stake in The Economist. Under the terms of the agreement, Nikkei will pay around £90 million toward the newspaper’s pension deficit.

Axel Springer, the owner of Die Welt, Bild and part of POLITICO’s European edition, had been in talks about buying the company and was thought to be the frontrunner until Thursday afternoon. However, it declared itself out of the race in a terse statement later in the day.

It is understood that Springer’s offer was not far off that of its Japanese rival. The German publisher found out only minutes before Nikkei announced it had reached an agreement that it had been outbid, insiders at the FT said.

Negotiations with Springer and Nikkei have been taking place for several months, the sources added.

Lionel Barber, the FT’s editor, told staff at a town hall meeting Thursday evening that it had not been a “shotgun” process, but was carefully thought-through.

Tsuneo Kita, Nikkei’s chairman and chief executive, said: “I am extremely proud of teaming up with the Financial Times, one of the prestigious news organizations in the world… We share the same journalistic values.”